How were the Middle and New England colonies alike?

One of the biggest similarities between the Middle and the New England colonies, when compared to the southern colonies, is that neither was a slave society. Both were "societies with slaves," meaning that enslaved people lived and worked in both, especially New York, but neither economy was based on slave labor in the way that South Carolina and the Chesapeake were. Another similarity is that both featured, by the standards of the day, large port cities that were the political and economic centers of the colonies. Of the largest cities in the colonies, three--Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City--were in the Middle and New England colonies. Both also featured relatively diverse economies, with maritime trade central to the economies of virtually all of the colonies in question. While some places in the Middle colonies, especially the Hudson River Valley in New York, had very large landholdings, both regions were dominated by small landholders who raised a variety of crops rather than the staple crops that characterized the Chesapeake and the Low County.